Modern retail stores sell a wide variety of items, including foodstuffs, home and kitchen goods, electronic goods, clothing, sporting goods and so on. Typically, the items are displayed on storage units with other similar products. Often the storage units are shelving units, though of course other forms of storage unit are often employed. The items are removed from the display units by customers, and taken to a point of sale or checkout to be purchased, and the units are replenished with items by retail store staff on a periodic basis.
In one example, the items on the units are replenished periodically. For example, the units may be replenished after the store closes each day. In such an example, if a particular item on the unit is exhausted during the day, it may not be replaced until several hours later, potentially resulting in lost sales. Equally, if instead retail store staff attempt to replenish the items on a more frequent basis, it may be the case that not enough of the items have been sold to warrant replenishment.
Increasingly, retail stores stay open for longer hours to provide greater customer convenience, with some stores opening 24 hours a day. In such stores, the replenishment of items must take place during the opening hours of the store. Consequently, there is a desire to replenish the units in such a way that customers are minimally inconvenienced by the presence of containers of stock on the shop floor.
In other examples, the items on the units may be replenished on an ad hoc basis, for example on the basis of a staff member inspecting the retail units and noting which items require replenishment. Whilst this may be manageable in a small store and in quiet periods, in large retail stores, such a system is error prone and difficult to manage in today's very large retail stores, which can occupy areas well in excess of 10,000 m2 and stock hundreds of thousands of different products.
A further difficulty arises in that items may be removed from the storage units by customers or staff and later incorrectly replaced thereon, leading to untidy and visually unappealing storage units. Also, the storage units may not be correctly stocked when the items are replenished by store staff. These erroneously displayed items may inconvenience other shoppers and may result in fewer sales of the items displayed on the untidy units.